Howto converts video to GIF and supports cropping, text and more

QGifer is a Qt tool available for Linux and Windows, that can convert part of a video to an animated GIF file.

QGifer isn’t just a simple video to GIF converter. Thanks to its feature set, the application feels almost like a video editor, except it doesn’t produce videos but animated GIF files: you can easily set which part of the video should be used in your GIF, crop the video, add text or images, apply filters and more.

Furthermore, the application comes with a GIF optimizer which you can use to reduce the file size of any GIF, not just those created using QGifer.QGifer features:

GIF extraction from a video file;

Color palette editor;

Variable color palette support;

Dithering;

Insert text and graphics – they can be displayed in all the frames or only certain frames;

Object interpolation;

Cropping;

Filtering;

Looping by appending reversed copy;

GIF optimization through ImageMagick;

Project management.

QGifer is great but there is one downside: it doesn’t support video files that come with more than 1800 frames and don’t use the motion JPEG or YUV4 codecs. To be able to use these videos, you must either re-encode them using a codec like motion JPEG (the application comes with a MJPEG converter which you can access from the menu: Program > MJPEG Converter – however, in my test, this tool wasn’t able to convert some videos I’ve downloaded from YouTube) or YUV4 or alternatively, cut the videos before importing them in QGifer.

To cut a video to be able to use it in QGifer, you can use a video editor such as OpenShot or you can do this via command line, using mencoder, ffmpeg (or “libav” – using the command line “avconv” tool), melt and so on. For instance, to cut the first 30 seconds from a video called “in.avi” using avconv, use the following command:

avconv -i in.avi -ss 00:00:00 -t 00:00:30 -c copy out.avi

The resulting “out.avi” video should only contain the first 30 seconds from the “in.avi” video.